Pi r square, Oreo are round.

As I promised yesterday, we're reviewing another strange, mutant strain of Oreo cookie today. Last week's Rocky Road Trip came out all right, at least by my reckoning, but what the galloping gourmet is this?

In time for America's favorite pie season -- roughly June to Thanksgiving -- we have Apple Pie Oreos, courtesy of Nabisco and its parent company, Mondelēz. The Apple Pie Oreo has artificially flavored apple pie filling with a graham flavored cookie. The cookie is also presumably artificially flavored; it does not actually taste like health-promoting minister Sylvester Graham, who was too busy spinning in his grave to comment.

Has Oreo finally gone a bridge too far with this one? The defining characteristics of the Oreo are the chocolate cookie and the vanilla-ish cream filling. Other Oreos of various incarnations generally have chocolate or vanilla in there somewhere -- chocolate cookie, chocolate filling, vanilla cookie, or vanilla filling -- but I think this may be the first I've tried that completely eschews both vanilla and chocolate. The question then is, is this really an Oreo?

Think about it: If it was a peanut-butter flavored cookie with peanut butter filling, and round, it could call itself an Oreo but we would know it was really just a round Nutter Butter. If it were an open-faced Oreo with a blob of marshmallow covered in fudge it would not be an Oreo, it would be a Mallomar. And yet this, and the Blueberry Pie Oreo, and the Strawberry Shortcake Oreo, and the possible-grounds-for-investigation-by-child-services-breakfast-police Waffles & Syrup Oreo, all pass for Oreos. Shouldn't Nabisco just have introduced these insane products as new cookies?

I'm sure there are sound marketing reasons for it -- shelf space, brand recognition, whatever. Slap "Oreo" on it and you don't even have to advertise; people will be looking in the Oreo section of the cookie aisle and wham! Red Velvet Oreos! But how far away from the original Oreo can you get and still be an Oreo?

Who knows? It's like one of those how-many-licks on the Tootsie Pop conundrums. The world may never know.

I brought this package to an informal meeting that was attended by a dozen people. I had one cookie before the meeting started. It tasted like apple pie. The graham cookie was less convincing, but definitely had hints of graham cracker, enough to make me think: Who uses a graham cracker crust for apple pie? No one.

At the end of the meeting I went to see if I could snag another and they were gone. This was not the only snack on the table, but it was the only one that had been consumed. These Oreos had been scoffed down with alacrity. The package was in the trash.

If we're going to keep behaving like that, Nabisco has every motivation to keep cranking the wacky Oreo flavors out. Look for New York Cheesecake Oreos, Saltwater Taffy Oreos, Alabama Slammer Oreos, Circus Peanut Oreos, Pizza Oreos, Hot Pockets Oreos (and Oreo Hot Pockets), Pop-Tart Oreos (and Oreo Pop-Tarts -- oops, too late), Green Bean Casserole Oreos, BBQ Oreos, and White Castle Oreos. There's no stopping them now.